The approaches described in this section could be pursued, but are not necessarily approaches that have been previously conceived or pursued. Therefore, unless otherwise indicated herein, the approaches described in this section are not prior art to the claims in this application and are not admitted to be prior art by inclusion in this section.
To address the depletion of available Internet Protocol Version 4 (IPv4) addresses, the adoption and deployment of IPv6 is accelerating. With IPv6 providing 128 bit addresses compared to the 32 bit addresses of IPv4, hosts connected to a network such as the Internet can communicate point-to-point using global addresses while avoiding workarounds developed for the IPv4 address space limitation, such as network address translation (NAT).
However, because workarounds such as NAT are no longer utilized in IPv6, a service provider must maintain routing information to successfully route to all hosts connected to the service provider, a task that might have been previously handled in part by a router with NAT. This routing information may be maintained at a switch or router at the edge of the provider side, for example as a cable modem termination system (CMTS), a digital subscriber line access multiplexer (DSLAM), a cellular broadband concentrator, or another access concentrator.